I'm so sick and tired of hearing the words "white privilege." During recent events I attended that were supposed to be about equality and justice, I heard a steady stream of racism and sexism directed exclusively against white men. "The college system was designed by white men so it is harder for minorities and women to operate in it," one speaker griped. Apparently she missed the fact that the majority of UConn's degrees go to women. "You don't understand the fear that women and minorities live in because you were born into 'white privilege,'" another told me. Really? Well, I apologize to anyone who's ever been scared of me.
To be honest though, the idea of "white privilege" is ridiculous. Sure, there are white people who live in areas with high incomes and great schools, but there are also a lot of white people who live in some of the poorest areas of the country. Look at Eastern Kentucky, for example. The best job most people there aspire to is coal mining. People live in dilapidated trailers and many barely have a high school education level. Owsley County in Eastern Kentucky ranks as the 7th-poorest county in the nation and is 99.2 percent white. Contrast the inhabitants of that county with the multitude of successful black entrepreneurs, athletes, movie stars, politicians, etc. People need to stop playing the race card by focusing on "white privilege." Instead, maybe we should discuss "the privilege of wealth" and talk about what we can do to ensure a good education for everyone, regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, religion or any of the other traits we use to divide us. People with more money have more power, regardless of their race, that's just the way our world works.
Anyone who is serious about equality needs to stop using race and gender as excuses and start working to make a real difference instead of blaming everything on white men. Police training facilities have had to deal with allegations of racial and gender intolerance for years. In 2001, a court case went all the way to the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals because the physical examination - a 1.5 mile run in 12 minutes - "excluded 93 percent of women" from becoming South Eastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) officers. Thankfully the court ruled that if the physical standards were to be lowered, SEPTA "would become a police force with officers who were a danger to themselves, other officers, and the public at large, who were unable to effectively fight and deter crime."
Affirmative action is another example of minorities and women being given preferential treatment just because they are minorities and women. Admission to schools needs to be based on merit and qualifications for the position, not race or gender. If white people or men were given preferential treatment during admission to a certain university, it would be called "racism" or "sexism." However, if minorities and women are given preferential treatment, it is called "equality."
Understand this, I am most definitely against racism and sexism in any form. In that vein, I don't think that affirmative action and the race card have any place in America. There are plenty of women and minorities who have risen to positions of power. Colin Powell, Bill Richardson, Condolleeza Rice, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, just to name a few of national importance.
Look around campus and you'll see even more. The Dean of Students is a woman, women are taking active leadership roles in churches and service organizations all around campus. If you haven't had a professor who is a woman or a member of a racial minority then I would be shocked.
Unfortunately, there are still people playing the race card on campus. For anyone who's been living in a cave, Doug Wiggins is a UConn basketball player who was given citations by the UConn police for underage alcohol possession and driving with a suspended license during a stop on Jan. 24. After this recent incident - Wiggins has had several run-ins with police in the past - Wiggins alleged that he felt the police discriminated against him because he is black and all four officers at the scene were white.
That is outrageous! The police were simply doing their job. The fact that Wiggins has failed two previous drug tests and has had several confrontations with UConn police in the past have nothing to do with race and everything to do with Wiggins acting irresponsibly. In an interview with the Hartford Courant, Wiggins said, "It's been a rough week for me, but you live and you learn." Obviously he hasn't learned anything except how to play the race card, since he still thinks police racism is "everywhere. That's going to be everywhere."
So here's the deal. Real equality is on the march, not in the form of the silly lectures that blame everything on white men, but in the professors and mentors we see around campus everyday, the presidential candidates vying to run this country, the athletes many of us look up to and so many other places where people are simply treated as people. If "the man" is still trying to keep people down, he's doing a pretty crappy job of it and I couldn't be happier about that. It's time for our nation to look forward away from racial prejudice and gender inequality and towards a brighter future for all people.
Weekly columnist George Maynard is a 4th-semester natural resource management and engineering major. His column appears on Thursdays and he can be reached at George.Maynard@UConn.edu.
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